I lecture Biochemistry at a small University in Oporto. Although originally raised as an experimental Biochemist, I have since changed my research into theoretical and computational chemistry and biochemistry. In this blog, I will mostly commment on recent (or not so recent...) research papers that happen to have called my attention. I hope someone will find it interesting/useful :-)

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

I thoroughly enjoyed the second "Promoting Female Excellence in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry" conference, both in choice of speakers and convivial atmosphere. The ratio of female/male speakers obviously favored females, but considering the nature of the conference I would not mind if it were even more skewed towards the female end of the scale, as it probably encourages audience questions from women. The format was very adequate, but ratio between established/early-career speakers might probably be adjusted slightly (for example by including a
dozen more presentations selected from poster submissions) to enable
increased "name-recognition" of younger researchers.

An
extra day or two, and some more free time for socialization would have
been very welcome: I found that the enthusiasm and conversation flow increased
substantially after the banquet talk, but by that time the meeting was
coming to an end and productive conversations had to be cut short due to
the need to catch the flights home. If the "after-banquet talk" could
be moved to the first night of the conference, the focus of
conversations during the meeting might have included more reflexion on
the sociology of our profession, the way that the subtle biases which
discourage hiring scientists with a publication-gap of a few years are
built/accepted/torn down, and so forth. That talk did serve as a wonderful
conversation starter.

I loved the presence of
children in the meeting, and think that a specific sentence in the
conference website
stating that they are welcome to the conferences would have a positive
effect in lowering barriers to attendance, and in removing the prevalent
"productivity-minded" biases which make graduate students, post-docs,
non-tenured faculty feel that embracing a scientific career must lead to
a neglect of other important parts of life. No matter how many
"empowering" talks, positive discrimination, awareness campaings, etc.,
an academic culture where powerful figures of authority (whether star
professors, PIs or funding agencies) demand or expect that researchers
put their personal life behind their scientific productivity skews the
resulting researcher pool towards the obsessively-driven,
hyper-ambitious, un-empathic tail of the population spectrum. Whether
that tail is mostly male, mostly female, or "equal-opportunity", it
favors non-collegial behavior
and chases good people away. Hyper-ambitious researchers may be very productive, but
they cannot produce much science if their behavior leads to
talented people fleeing towards other endeavors.

Congratulations to the organizing team, and a heartfelt "thank you" to all participants.